Those Rainy Nights
by ncfan
Summary: "I wish I had children."


I own nothing.

* * *

Funny, isn't it, how the weather only ever seems capable of being one of two things on the day of a funeral? It can either be the prettiest day you've ever seen, blue skies, bright sun, no clouds anywhere, or the gloomiest, the rain never, ever stopping. Today has been the latter sort of funeral day, the rain coming down in torrents, and yet, there's no wind. There are little streams in the yards (Tomohisa brought Tatsuya in soaking wet), rivers in the streets, and yet, not even God can lend His voice to this day.

Maybe it's not funny, after all.

Junko supposes that it's probably night, now. She can't remember how to access her clock with the drink fogging her mind, and God knows with this sort of weather you can't really tell the difference between night and day to begin with, but she thinks it's night. The streetlamps outside are on. They aren't turned on until eight at this time of year. It must be at least eight o'clock. Must be.

The funeral… The funeral really was awful. Junko had left before Madoka, ashamed to do so, but she just couldn't stand the sound of Kaori weeping. She's not sure why that was, but something about the woman wailing and sobbing in front of her daughter's picture just reached its claws in and ripped out all of Junko's fortitude.

The smell of dozens of bouquets of flowers saturated the air. No one dared approach Kaori—bereft of all other sound, her weeping filled the room, an eerie specter defying others to defile the sanctity of grief. Not even Kaori's own husband, pallid and grave, would put his hands on her. The room just kept getting smaller and smaller, and Junko…

…Junko just couldn't stay.

_But I should have, shouldn't I? A mother shouldn't leave a funeral before her child. At times like this, when a girl's mourning because her friend is dead, her mother ought to be at her side the whole time, ready with a shoulder to cry on, or a hand to help her up. I ought to have stayed. But I just ran away._

_I really messed up, didn't I? Maybe this is why she won't be open with me…_

A soft clink to her left makes Junko lift her eyes from the distorted reflection given to her in glass of stinging, unforgiving beer. Kazuko is reaching for the bottle with which she filled her martini glass, so she can drink more… Wine? Tequila? Junko's not sure what that is Kazuko's drinking—that's kind of worrying (or would be, if this was the time to be worrying about such things), considering it came from Junko's stores.

It's electric blue and seems to be glowing. Maybe it's radioactive. Junko considers telling Kazuko that she shouldn't be drinking something that might be radioactive, but lets it lie. If Kazuko starts glowing blue, Junko will know it was radioactive after all.

Kazuko lifts her delicate glass to her lips, slightly slack with drink and stunned grief, and Junko turns her eyes away. We aren't supposed to watch our fellows drink, not when they drink to take the razor edge off of sorrow.

_And she'll want to drink again, every day when she sees that empty desk._

"I…" Kazuko's whispery voice is slightly hoarse, and Junko looks up, surprised to hear her break the silence "…I wish I had children." Her eyes are dim and drooping, her lip quavering just a bit.

Junko feels something hot and swelling lodge fast in her throat; she tries to swallow, but finds that it hasn't gone. "Kazuko…"

"I really wish…" Kazuko's lips form a trembling line that might be a smile, but the sheen in her eyes behind the lenses of her glasses speaks of something standing opposite from smiles "…that I had children."

In the presence of another, Kazuko would be reprimanded for saying such a thing at a time like this. _'The funeral of a child is no time to be expressing baby madness, Saotome Kazuko', _they would say. And maybe they'd be right. But Junko knows that thoughts assert themselves inappropriately sometimes, and that when grief strikes, no one should be browbeaten for their thoughts.

But at times like this, Junko wishes the opposite.

That's another inappropriate thought, but Junko can not deny the life it has inside her head. At times like this, when a young girl she knew is dead, when there are reports of early death and destruction coming from everywhere at once, she looks at her children.

She looks at Madoka, who is pale, all the color drained from her cheeks, and keeping secrets. She looks at the daughter who has become a stranger in an instant, the daughter she lost somewhere.

She looks at Tatsuya, who is still lively and happy. She looks at het son who is still too young to understand that the world is fully of death and despair or what that even means, the son who's too young to understand that some day, all this will end.

She looks at them, and wishes she didn't have them.

Junko loves her children, loves them both, and never voices this thought, knowing she would be thought cold, unloving, unnatural. But she knows that every parent under the sun has these thoughts on occasion, the good and the bad. She knows that the culture of silence, the culture of "It's never okay to feel anything but overwhelming love for your children" keeps them quiet, for fear of being misheard.

It's not like anyone ever understands what they mean by that, anyway.

Sometimes, when she hears news of death, or when she's in the position of watching a parent scream out her grief to a room that refuses to touch her, Junko wishes she didn't have children. It would be easier, so much easier, to go through life without the fear that she would end up like Kaori, would be easier to know that she would never have to stare at a photo of one of her children, surrounded by flowers, and know that this was all she was ever going to have. It would be easier, if she could have the guarantee that she would not outlive her children, that she would never have to bury either of them, and say goodbye in her heart.

Sometimes, parenthood breeds more sorrow and more fear than it does joy.

Being a teacher, surrounded by children, Junko is sure Kazuko knows this. She must know this on an intellectual level. But that lack of emotional understanding is probably what keeps her wishing she had children, even at times like this.

Junko summons a weak smile for her friend. "…It's not too late, Kazuko. You're younger than I am, after all, and look, I have a three-year-old. You could still have kids." Junko neglects to mention that, at Kazuko's age, pregnancy would be an even riskier venture than it is for those twenty-five-year-olds you constantly see plastered on the billboards and the magazine covers.

Kazuko just shakes her head miserably; a half-hearted thunderclap overhead seems to underline her feelings. "Not without a husband, I couldn't. And it's not like I can ever find a man willing to have me, anyways." If there's a particularly maudlin note to that voice, it could be the alcohol, or it could be Kazuko's own depression over her interminable list of failed relationships rearing its ugly head again.

She who _can _call herself a mother finds herself wincing, bringing her glass to her lips in an attempt to shave off the ever-growing lump in her throat.

At the office, Junko is more than accustomed to her women friends mocking Kazuko. Well, not Kazuko, exactly. More precisely, she's grown accustomed to hearing them mock women _like _Kazuko.

The women who count "getting married" and "having children" as something important enough to qualify as life goals, those are the women they deride and scorn. They call women like Kazuko weak-willed and wishy-washy. They say she sets the feminist movement back a hundred years; "Oh, great Kazuko; why don't you get our right to vote repealed, while you're at it?" They say that her "obsession" with finding a husband and having children shows her to be a weak, anti-feminist sort of woman.

The more sympathetic of these women, the ones who don't mock but merely cluck and shake their heads, remark that even as a housewife and mother, a woman's not going to be happy. They say that even filling her days with her children, she'll still feel empty. Like she's missing something. Having a family, they say, is not enough to make a woman feel fulfilled.

Junko isn't convinced. She has both a good, successful career and a family. Maybe it's because she's older, more experienced with life than the sort of women who put down other women because they're "anti-feminist", but she alone out of the women in the office seems to understand that there's more than one route to happiness. She doesn't think that Kazuko would immediately quit her job if she was to get married, and then pregnant. Regardless of what the other women at the office think, Junko doesn't think Kazuko would just turn into an "anti-feminist housewife" if she got married.

"What about all your students?" Junko presses, hoping desperately to get Kazuko into a somewhat-cheerful state again; _I don't think I'm in any condition to cheer her up. _"Aren't you mother to all of them?"

Kazuko shakes her head vigorously; her cheeks darken as her glasses go askew thanks to this, and she pushes them back up hastily. "'s not the same," she mumbles, slumping slightly in her chair. Junko finds she has to tilt her head down even more than usual to look at Kazuko.

"I wish I had children… If… If I did, maybe I'd understand why kids do these things to themselves; it seems it's been so long since I was their age that I've forgotten. Maybe I'd understand why they keep doing things that hurt their friends, hurt themselves. Maybe I'd understand why they go to such lengths…

"Maybe I'd understand what would drive a girl to do that sort of thing to herself."

At this, Junko's eyes snap to Kazuko's face; specifically, to the teacher's dull brown eyes. _The police didn't find any wounds, no needle marks, nothing. The blood work's not back yet, but still, they don't think she killed herself._

_Why should you assume something so distressing?_

Personally, Junko prefers to believe that Sayaka didn't kill herself. She knew the girl fairly well; she was Madoka's closest friend, after all. Sayaka was highly idealistic, and a little prone to getting depressed over things she shouldn't be depressed over, but Junko just can't believe that she'd go to those lengths over a bout of depression. Maybe she just doesn't want to believe that someone so close to her daughter would kill herself.

But in all honesty, if Sayaka didn't kill herself, how did she die? There are no marks on her body, no sign of foul play. She had no known illnesses, no medical issues that could have led to an untimely death. She'd been missing for days, and suddenly just showed up in a hotel room across town, still in her school uniform, and quite dead.

_It's like she just dropped dead out of the blue. Maybe… Maybe that is what happened._

_That's terrifying._

"It's different when you're a teacher." Kazuko has started to talk again, after a long bout of silence. She reaches up to run a small hand through her short brown hair. "You love these kids, even the ones that drive you nuts, and sometimes, they like you too, but there's a wall there… You'll never be as important to them as their friends, or their parents, you'll never mean as much to them as the others in their lives, and they don't talk to you like they do them. You know them so well, but even if they like you, they trust you about as much as they do a stranger.

"They don't confide in you, they don't tell you when something's wrong. They'll do anything to convince you that anything's wrong, won't hesitate to lie to you to keep you from thinking something's wrong." Kazuko's voice cracks, and she downs her glass before going on. "And then," she whispers, the deep shadows falling over her face, "they leave for the day, and they forget you.

"And sometimes, they don't come back."

Kazuko looks up at Junko, and smiles a broken smile, her eyes swimming with tears. The rain outside seems unnaturally loud in her ears. _Don't say it. Please don't say it. Kazuko, don't say it._

"And all you can do, is wonder how they got like that, and realize that you were just a stranger, after all."

Silence reigns supreme after this; no voice would dare intrude upon them. Kazuko reaches for the bottle again, even as salt water trickles down her cheeks of its own accord; she barely seems to notice that she's crying.

Junko slouches in her chair, and stares out the window, the dull roar of the rain filling her ears. She feels like she could just go find a place outside to stand and drown in. _I… I really don't know anything, do I? I can't say how Sayaka ended up dead, and I can't see past Madoka's eyes. I can't even find the words to stop Kazuko from crying._

She's useless.

It doesn't matter.


End file.
